Kristianstill

Sadly, during our Ministers presentation at SSAT, we were not able to see his presentation due to a corrupt USB drive. I was saddened that no-one in his support team had shown him one of the many remote services. He are two FREE solutions;

LogMeIn (Windows/Mac)

LogMeIn offering a quick, no-hassle set up to remotely control your computer from the comfort of any web browser. LogMein has Free and Pro accounts, with the pro account adding more features to the service, including drag-and-drop file transfer, file sync, and meeting tools.

There are a number of other remote access solutions, there Remote Desktop Connection in WIndows and uNVC for example.

OR upload your Powerpoint to a hosting services, available for download by delegates, students or not, its your choice, but always there as a backup. Slideshare and Authorstream (which I blogged about previously). Or use an online Office solution.

There are other options, but thats more than enough.

Memory 4 Teachers is a major new ICT initiative taking place within the UK education sector.

The project has been developed, in association with LEAs and Teacher Unions, to support teachers and educators in addressing their ever-increasing workloads by funding the provision of 750,000 USB memory sticks across the UK. Simply register and they will send you your FREE USB memory stick preloaded with a range of educational resources. The project launches at BETT 14-17 January 2009.

http://www.memory4teachers.co.uk/index.asp

A enjoyable start to the day with a  seminar style event with Sir Ken Robinson, only problem was the booking system delayed the start and frustrated a fair few delegates and of course restricted the time we had to hear him speak and confer with the audience. Technology, you can’t rely on it? Disappointingly, just ask the Minister if you dont believe me.

We then looked around the exhibition, I liked one or two products, in particular nComputing who were offer low-cost virtualization software /hardware to tap into the unused capacity of the classroom PCs and share it with other users. 1 PC acting as a host to 6 PCs.

Benefits are; creating desktop space, dramatically reducing your e-waste and recycling costs and a reduction in power, well your are only running 1 PC for 6 access points. All PCs are recognised by any classroom management software you have running.

Another interesting product was Vivo Miles. Vivo Miles is a very comprehensive rewards and sanction system and very current in its design and application. Plugins allow it to integrate with websites and they have plans to marry up with the VLE providers. A powerful way to raise standards but also for students understand and achieve economic well-being. Its a schools club card – complete with its own hole in the wall. What I will note, is that its visual presentation is excellent, a very web vogue, social networked, internet market place user interface will, IMHO engage.

Next Sir Michael Barber, again a very impressive public speaker offering an aliens aural feedback from a recent Earth inspection – the written feedback to be posted later. Outlining where perhaps organisational failing are impacting on education. Concluding with E(K+T+L) an the equation / solution left by the aliens to prompt thinking. That Knowledge plus Thinking plus Leadership underpinned by ethics is required for effective leadership, and from his tone, not only in education.

Charles Leadbeater - web thinker / innovator highlighted the shareability of the web, and that term again, web 2.0. For the SSAT conference, I felt that the pitch was excellent, as web innovators / enthusiasts often engulf their audience with techno speak / babble. I wise decision considering the next keynote information….

‘The web allows them (Charles Leadbeater referred mainly to learners, which this context inferred students, but I am confident his view is broader than that) not just to publish but to share and connect, to collaborate and when the conditions are right, to create, together, at scale.’

His analogy of big organisations as boulders, including schools, being hard to move was coupled with the new technologies as pebbles more fluid and flexible, slowly swamping the cumbersome boulders. I enjoyed the analogy of User Generate Content (UGC) as pebbles, but I think the boulders are a little further up the beach than he perhaps presented, but that would have been a far less impressive communique. And yes, perhaps Google and little brother Youtube are the best pebble examples in the mainstream. In fairness he touched on others, World of Warcarft, Sims, Flickr.

(What would a seminar follow up with? Twitter? Social BookMarking)

Should any educator stumble upon the post FREE animation tools and some great examples! Now stickman may look simple, but our Year 7s and 8s spend hours creating and share it and there is a huge back channel / community sharing ideas.

Finally, the impact of generations and eras on leaders and leadership and Dr Graeme Codrington keynote. Although not obvious to me as an aspiring young teacher, this is very important. Ironically, it was as important to the seasoned professionals in the audience. It would appear, few of the professionals in the audience, either young or seasoned, had fully considered the imapct of their default settings on colleagues they worked with. Something to reflect upon. Dr Graeme Codrington has promised that these slides will be available but a short cut to the download section of his site.

So, another very good day. Now for the informal learning.

Topic or Tool: Ancient Rome in Google. Wow. Google has released an “Ancient Rome 3D” layer for their popular Google Earth browser. The new layer shows many of the buildings and structures that made up the city during the rule of Constantine the Great. Some of the buildings even have interiors.

What does it cost? FREE as part fo the Google Earth tool. Another great amazing tool.

How it could be used for teaching?

I recently read about hi tech 3D immersive education at a school costing serious investment and although not fully immersive, it is free. This product allows you to;

• Fly into Rome as it looked in 320 A.D.
• Tour the interior of famous buildings.
• Visit the sites in 3D such as the Roman Forum, Colosseum and the Forum of Julius Caesar.
• Learn about how the Romans lived.

Dont expect me to tell you how to use this tool, be imaginative, but Google also announced a curriculum competition in conjunction with the release. Educators who create the most interesting curricula based lessons around the Ancient Rome 3D layer will receive a range of goodies. Maybe HIAS can offer goodies for the best shared resources? Would that encourage educators to share?

Watch the Youtube press video here.

How it could be used for learning?

Not having spent that long in ancient Rome, you could certainly set an orienteering task, a Roman treasure hunt. As the competition gaunlet has been laid down, can we put forward an offering to compete with our Amerian counterparts? Post your ideas here of contribute to the Google Doc.

I hope to send out the invites real soon.

For the past three months I have had an on going conversation with Virgin Media over problems I have been experiencing with my PC. Some to do with the Virgins PC Guard and then later, I thought to do with being hyjacked. We have had an engineer visit, a new modem and many conversations with their customer service department. Finally, after a further phones calls / departments and email tennis, I was told that it was an issue my end and that I needed to deal with it. Gee, that was helpful.I coudl ring their IT department where calls would be charged at x rate per minute.

So let me highlight a very different approach. I searched the internet and arrived at www.pchelpforum.com. I created an account, read a few posts and followed their instructions on posting to the PC Security forum. I join and first spoke to ‘Upgrader’ and ‘Jellybean.’ Jellybean was professional and welcoming, he was not dismissive of my lack of computer literacy, but still reinforced the neccessity to fulfil the requires outlined on the site before posting to the forum. He explained that once the information had been posted, their PC security would look at it for me.I asked how this service was supoprted to which he outlined the voluntary, supoprtive nature of the site. I was impressed. We talked about security, about PC Guard, about replacing PC Guard, and one or two issues that might be causing the problem. As I said, welcolming but professional.

Shortly after I have posted, maybe the next day, ‘Pancake,’ left me more instructions to follow and a list of further notes to post. I dutifully completed these, re-posted. Pancake gave me the thumbs up and so ar so good. As recommended, I ran AVG security, Malwarebytes and I am back up and running two days laters. So three months with Virgin vs 3 days with PChelpforum, you chose. So here is my recommendation of thanks. Did I mention there is a whole host of extra support there too?